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Hey chosen ones!We are currently working hard on the Naar project, we’re currently in the polishing phase on a new demo for you guys to try out. As soon as we have a stable version ready to show you, you will be notified.

What to expect in the upcoming demo:

A lot of platforming

Two bosses

And little bit of the story

Stay tuned and we shall show you what’s in our cooking pot. The demo will be presented at Gotland Game Conference in May 22-23. And will be available for you to try out around that time!

In the meanwhile we would appreciate it if you could take 5 mins of your time to help us with some research we’re doing for our bachelor theses connected to the Naar project.

We have two tests we’d like you to participate in, one is regarding body language, where you observe some animations that we have created and answer the question.

The other one is about different types of space, and how they can affect player emotions.

Hello everyone, you may have noticed that we haven’t made much noise during the last few months. We took a short break to focus on school, but do not fret, we’ll soon be back with more updates, and this time you’ll be getting more than just arena combat!

We will start with the production at the end of this month, trying the features as we go along, the level build will be released later on in the production and we hope that you stay and try it again.

A lot of feedback have been received from you asking for more platforming, and that’s what you’ll be getting in the upcoming level we’re making! Along with that, we’re also planning to possibly implement some new spells, a boss fight, and even a small glimpse of the story we’ve got in store for Naar.

But until we’ve got most of the new level ready, you’ll be able to try out upcoming features in the arena.

A special thanks to the people that downloaded our game and left us with a lot of feedback and bugs to fix! Hopefully we’ll be able to build something great here with your help! The adventure will be starting soon, and we hope to see you in Al-Dunya!

Some minor adjustments was also made in the tutorial level to match the current spell casting.

We spent some time with feedback given to the player, such astaking & making damage, we still have a distance to go before we feel completely satisfied with our mechanics, that means that you may still give your opinions on our different features.

Regarding builds for different platforms

First off; when we finally pinned down our last tasks, we prepared to build for the different platforms, but packaging the project failed, we stayed up all night trying to find the solution but did not manage to do it.When we finally were able to build we were only able to build for Windows 32 & 64 bit, the mac version required a specific file which we could not retrieve. And we have not had time to fix a version for Linux as of yet, we will look more into this for the next version.
If we even touch a variable we wont be able to build anything because of packaging fails, until we solve this we cant build new versions.

The near feature

We will take a short holiday until the second week of January. When the new year begins, we plan to start developing the demo. New enemy designs are incoming and some Naarative will be implemented bit by bit. Our end goal will be to have a complete and polished demo at the end of May, with a new level and more magic to cast!

We hope that you enjoy playing in our arena, and don’t forget to leave us feedback!Stay tuned for future updates! And we appreciate all the help we received from you!

First of all, a big thanks to all the people from Imgur who turned up to try out our prototype last week! For those who don’t know what we’re talking about, we made a post at Imgur last week, and a lot of people showed interest and gave us feedback. We even had some people who offered their services with effects, music and voice acting, a special thanks to you guys!

After the arena build release and receiving a lot of helpful feedback, we are currently working on adding more waves of enemies, as well as tweaking the AI and mechanics of the individual enemies. A lot of new animations have been implemented and yes, the mustache is alive, we have now implemented jiggle-physics.

Aside from that, we are polishing all the mechanics to provide with a smoother and more challenging gameplay.

And for all of you who are not comfortable with the camera movement, we have implemented the ability to invert the camera movement in both Y and X-axis! This can be accessed through the menu screen.

We have no plans to implement free aim for this version, but our programmer is aiming to implement a lock-on system, making it possible for you to hard lock onto targets and cycle between them.

Music

During our first few builds we were contacted by Sixten (a composer and sound editor), he jumped in and started to work with music for Naar. He has provided us with two sounds, one for the title and one for the combat. He is is a talented individual as you will hear.

Versions

Regarding the different version compatibility, we will try to build for Windows 32bit & 64bit, and Linux. But to be able to build for Mac-versions we need to get a hold of a Mac computers and that is not possible for us right now. We apologize to the people on mac computers who wanted to try out our prototype, and we hope you’ll hang on until we manage to get a version for you to play!

Hey hey hey! We hope that you enjoyed some of the fighting in our arena!

For this week we are going to make a quick update on things that are in the making!We pushed in our new character model, we call it Simm (The arabic word for poison). A conjured being that is half snake – and half something else! It will always try to keep its distance between itself and you, so try to be quick on your feet!

We also added a target marker to indicate which enemy you are aiming at.

For the next couple of weeks we will work on a lot of polishing based on the feedback we received from all of you. Such as when casting magic, getting hit or hitting an enemy! Before we continue adding more enemies and spells, we need to polish the features currently implemented , and hopefully replace a lot for the placeholders that we still have in the game.

Just as a reminder, this game is mainly intended to be played with a controller so if you are able, consider trying it out for the optimal experience.Oh and don’t forget to leave us feedback, we really need to know how you feel about our prototypes!

We are proceeding into the seventh week of development and things are looking great!

At this point we are leaving the tutorial stage/obstacle course for some time. Of course we’ll keep iterating on the movement mechanics. However, right now we’re busy working on the new arena mode that we mentioned last week! AI, spellcasting and graphics have been the focus for this week, and will probably stay so for the coming weeks. New textures and props are being created for the arena.

The enemies emerge from the entrances of the arena and head directly towards you for the fight. The enemies behaviour work as follow; as soon as they spot you they will chase you and attack you, if you disappear from their line of sight, they will gather in the center of the arena and attempt to spot you.

We are halfway done with the second enemy, the mesh, rig,skinning and AI are done, now we need to create the texture and animations and we are good to go! But as we have learned, animating takes a lot of time, that means that we may not be able to implement the final animation set for the upcoming version.

Which color theme do you like?

As for now we have three regular spells and one spell combination ready, remember that the ideal way to control the player is with a “Gamepad”. The Keyboard mapping is a lot harder than we expected, but we will try to make it as fluent as possible.

Regarding in-game sound, we have been using placeholder sound for the magic attacks due to us not having access to these assets yet, we may use some older ones for this as soon as we are able to access them from the GGC (Gotland Game Conference) project.

But we have some good news, we are in contact with a sound and music producer and he has made us some samples, the work he has done so far is very promising.So stay tuned by subscribing for newsletters in our website, and the next version will be available for download this weekend!Don’t forget to leave us feedback so that we can make the game as great as possible!

A lot of discussions have been held in the group regarding a lot of topics in our current course, as we are proceeding with creating this game we have to calculate the best way to reach our audience. Our numbers tell us that we need to work harder on raising the amount of downloads and feedback submissions, in order to tackle this issue we are planning on modifying our approach in a few ways.

One in particular is that we decided that we decided to do was to have bigger releases so that you as a player will have more noticable changes to try out in each new version, because of this we will go on to release a build every two weeks from now on.

So for this week we won’t release a build, but next week you will be able to experience several new features.

What you should be expecting in the next version is a lot of fighting!

We are currently working on an arena mode where you have to fight oncoming waves of Djinns! In your arsenal you will have your magic, you have three different elements at your disposal and you should be able to combine them. This will be the first version of the combination mechanic and it will be iterated as we proceed with the game.

The level is still under construction, but of course we still have a sneak peek of the arena for you:

At the end of next week we are iterating a lot of things and polishing some of the animations and adding new ones, we do some playtesting ourselves of course to see what we are missing or find eventual bugs.

This happens when animation blending goes wrong…….. Yeah….

We have some basic enemy AI (Artificial Intelligence) implemented right now, which looks promising but we still have some more things to add to it. Right now we only have one enemy but we are working with a second enemy which is still in the designing stage.

In the meantime, please feel free to download the previous version and give us your feedback on it.

We have currently been working with a lot of animations and tweaking them, two different for casting and and respektive blended animations. Now you will be able to run and gun at the same time.

And of course you will have something to shoot at, some jugs have been placed in specific places at the obstacle course and an enemy is hiding somewhere in the level. You don’t have anything to aim with but the character will shoot in the direction he’s facing.

A second spell has been added for you to try out, the fireball is short ranged and the laser beam is long range (the name may change later on)

Some particle effects have been adjusted, and one for the light beam has been added, they are still under construction but feel free to add your comment on that.

The level have some extra floors added, let’s see if you like the challenge. And this time you will need to make use of the dashing ability. fo sho! Oh and there is also some tutorialinformation if you feel unsure on how to play.

There are a lot of adjustments that will be done with the level environment, let’s say that we will add some color to it. An arena mode for fighting should be available soon as well as enemies to fight! Yeah and you will have some new spells to fend them off with.

We have difficulties regarding cloth physics, when we add apex to unreal the mesh disappears, we tried different ways but none of them worked so we decided that we have to put it on ice. And yes.. we will make the mustache move soon enough.

We still have much to do, but we are getting there. We rely a lot on your feedback so be sure to give it to us!

Until then, play the game and tell us what you feel 😀

Now go and have fun!

Change log

-Fireball

-Plater can now cast a fireball spell

-(Added casting animation)

-Added Fireball effect

-Laser beam

-Player can now cast a laserbeam spell

-Animation

-Laser beam effect (mechanicaly the same as fireball)

-Dash

-New Animation

-Modified speed to reduce the hard break at the end

-Ghoul

-Enemy type added to the game

-Will attempt to attack the player on sight

-Will kill the player in five hits

-Returns to its start when losing track of the player

-Can be killed by hitting it with magic

-Player Animations

-Added animation for dying

-Added animation for taking damage

-Level

-Updated level a lot

-Added tutorial elements

-Added destructable vases to the map. They can be smashed using spells.

We made a lot of new adjustments and added animations as listed above, we wanted to push out as much feature as we could so that we could continue with more of the planned features. In this version we added some magic, the fireball is a short ranged attack and is supposed to work as blasting damage. Mid range and long range are in our plan too, and some more of the magic fighting stand in line!

A new dash has been added, and looks better now than before, and we also added some particle effects for the “braking” part of the animation!

So jump in and feel free to blast away some spheres, cones… or some of the “toxic” targets. Stay tuned for next week’s upcoming iterations!

The previous week has been hectic and we had to work on different things from other courses, which lead to us cutting down on some of the features we were hoping to add.

But we got some of them done (they still need some tweaking of course);

The movement has been adjusted, the walk animation can only be seen using a gamepad.

The jump height has been adjusted and a new animation for the jump has been added.

The jump is now also dynamic, you jump higher if you hold in the jump button.

The ablility to Dash has been added.

The level has been adjusted.

Last time we checked we had 40+ people that downloaded the prototype, but only 14 people giving us feedback. We speculated on the probability that they push the download button first, play the game and then forget about leaving feedback. So we are trying a different approach now, we’ve have added a feedback button in the game and hope that people remember it. If the number of participants equals the number of feedback given, that would mean that our speculations were on spot.Next week we will hopefully get some new features up, especially “casting a fireball” which we could not add due to the extra features needed for that, like aiming, casting, hitting etc.

Enjoy this weeks prototype and we appreciate the feedback we receive from you!